This Thing Called Theory

In the age of post-digital architecture and digital materiality, This Thing Called Theory explores current practices of architectural theory, their critical and productive role. The book is organized in sections which explore theory as an open issue in architecture, as it relates to and borrows from other disciplines and practice, thus opening up architecture itself and showing how architecture is inextricably connected to other social and theoretical practices.

The sections move gradually from the specifics of architectural thought – its history, theory, and criticism – and their ongoing relation with philosophy to the critical positions formulated through architecture’s specific forms of expression and onto more recent forms of architecture’s engagement and self-definition. The book’s thematic sessions are concluded by and interspersed with a series of shorter critical position texts, which, together, propose a new vision of the contemporary role of theory in architecture. What emerges, overall, is a critical and productive role for theory in architecture today: theory as a proposition, theory as task and as a ‘risk’ of architecture.

Teresa Stoppani is professor of Architecture at Leeds Beckett University, where she directs the PhD in Architecture programme. She is the author of Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice (Routledge, 2010) and of the forthcoming X Unorthodox Ways to Rethink Architecture and the City (Routledge, 2017).

George Themistokleous is a lecturer in Architectural History and Theory and Architectural Design at Leeds Beckett University. His doctoral research considers the limitations of current architectural representational methods in relation to a re-thinking of bodily and machinic vision, through custom made optical devices and multimedia installations.

Giorgio Ponzo is a lecturer in Architectural Design at the Leeds School of Architecture, Leeds Beckett University. His research pursues a definition of (architectural) knowledge as a combination and recombination of fragments of discourse, where the work of the architect becomes a combinatory practice.